Cameron Bellm, JML’s Blogger in Residence, recently interviewed Jessica Gerhardt, a singer-songwriter, worship musician, artist, rosary maker and writer originally from Santa Monica, California.
It’s clear from your music that Ignatian spirituality is really important to you. Could you tell us a bit about your background and how you came to find a home there?
I attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and one of the closest parishes was St. Ignatius, the only Jesuit parish in Oregon. I would go to their Sunday 7 p.m. Contemplative Mass, where it was dark and candlelit, they used incense, and the music was always one person on guitar singing classic hymns in a folk style or two-voice polyphony with piano — it was always beautiful and reverent.
The homilies were deep, insightful and practical. When I came back home to LA after graduating, I was connected to a Jesuit spiritual director who has walked with me now for almost 15 years. I developed a daily relationship with Ignatian spirituality through liturgy, retreats, spiritual direction and working with the Exercises through the 19th annotation.
Over the years the tools of discernment, seeking to cultivate indifference, noticing my feelings, navigating consolation, desolation, and counter movements, and always re-anchoring myself in God’s love and grace through remembering with gratitude have all come up for me in my creative life and found their way into my songwriting.
You not only wrote and performed all the songs on your album “Alight Beyond the Sea,” but you also made the embroidery cover art for all 10 songs on the record. Can you tell us about that process and what it was like working in two different media?
I had started working on the record with a couple friends in 2019, but when COVID hit, sessions became remote. I also had a number of different friends who were producers, so I thought working on different songs with different producers would not only help showcase the talent of folks in my community but also be more efficient. Turns out it was way more follow-up and cats to herd than I thought, and, as a creative with ADHD, it took a lot longer.
The record was done in 2024, but I had been trying to think about the presentation. During lockdown when all my gig work went away, I had more time to revisit my visual art expression through various media: painting, drawing, jewelry and rosary making. Embroidery art was a new one I’d taken up that I really enjoyed.
I decided I wanted to hand embroider the art for each song, and that all together took another year, in between it being a time-consuming medium and experiencing creative resistance/avoidance. I love how contemplative and solitary stitchwork is, and it helps me grow in patience. Recording is really fun and usually collaborative for me, and it scratches my extroverted itch. It was nice to have both independent and collective modes of creativity go into the final product.
I’m always interested in how the creative life and the spiritual life intertwine and inform each other. What has that been like in your experience?
I have worked through the book “The Artist’s Way”a bunch of times, and it really helped me better connect God as Creator with being the source of all creativity; see the natural world as an ongoing, ever-unfolding work of art; and see creativity as my vocation as a person made in the Imago Dei. I’m still unlearning ideas about prayer and making art as separate, although I do find at times that my spiritual life requires less productive activity or no activity, so for me sometimes making art is great, and then I just need to go sit and close my eyes somewhere to satisfy my spiritual needs.
When I was discerning about leaving my full-time youth ministry job in 2019, my friend Matt who lives at the LA Catholic Worker reminded me that art is resistance, and that was really liberating. I think I saw art as this pursuit that wasn’t as “needed” and thought that it was somewhat selfish to leave something as externally service-oriented as youth ministry to go make art. But doing so definitely helped me grow spiritually in trust, in gentleness with myself, and in inviting God to move through me as their instrument. I see art as ministry now — not just explicit worship music, but my indie music too. Songwriting is prayerful and has been an outlet for me in response to the beauty of encountering God as well as the heartbreak of injustice in our world.
Your song “Suscipe” (listen here) is deeply beautiful and moving. Could you tell us about what Ignatius’ prayer has meant to you, and what it was like setting a 500-year-old prayer to music and placing it within your modern context?
Thank you! That prayer has been a really helpful one for me. While suscipe means “receive,” the prayer is so much about letting go and detachment. Of course, that’s what we have to do to make more room to receive God more fully. I wrote a song in 2011 about that as well called “Morning Moon,” using the imagery of moon phases to talk about feeling empty at times, but recognizing that it’s from those places I have more room to be filled.
I wrote “Suscipe” a few years later, after pursuing music in LA through my 20s and realizing that certain performative aspects of the proverbial “hustle” just weren’t aligning with me. Brené Brown writes about not needing to “chase your worthiness” and that really resonates.
The Ignatian prayer highlights forgetting about yourself, and indeed, it is worrying all the time about how I’m perceived by others that can really be a source less of joy and more of anxiety. My musical interpretation of the prayer manifested by highlighting my desire to let go of all those external things, and to focus more on God’s love for me. Whenever I’m anxious, my spiritual director reminds me to pause and notice how God is looking at me, to be still and receive God’s gaze. I think that’s the heart of Suscipe. And the more we make room to be filled with God’s love, the more we can pour it out in the world.
In addition to writing and performing music, you’re also a visual artist, writer on cultural issues, and teacher of theology. This is an amazing range of pursuits! Is there a thread that runs through all of them?
I got really into the Enneagram a few years ago, and I identify as a 2, the Helper. I have a genuine desire to help others, and I feel such great fulfillment knowing that something I did or made helped another person. My need to be needed used to manifest in burning myself out in service, and while youth ministry was also a ton of fun and taught me a lot, I think discerning a call to leave it to be a freelance artist/musician was a great way to let go of that codependent tendency. Richard Rohr calls it “indirect egotism,” which feels like a punch in the gut, but a helpful one nonetheless. No one “needs” my art. That’s hard on my ego, but it’s great for curbing ineffective ways of me trying to get my needs met.
I’ve found that my art that seems to help people most when I was less focused on self-denial or avoidance and rather on being present to my own needs, feelings and inspiration. I also find that I’m most fulfilled when I’m communicating interconnected ideas with others.
Another tool for understanding human diversity is StrengthsFinder, and two of my top five strengths are communication and connectedness. Teaching, singing, sharing art — these are all ways that I can communicate ideas about my deeply held values, what I find beautiful, what I feel, and how I see connections between them and how I form connections with others. Whether I’m performing an original song about moving through grief on a stage or nerding out with my students on metaphors about purgatory, I feel a similar kind of fulfillment. I feel that I am able to be seen and known through both of these modalities, and I feel I am helping others in meaningful ways. As a person with ADHD too, I’m happy doing lots of different things. I definitely feel like a jack of all trades, master of none at times, but I think that’s just how I’m wired to be.
